Author Description

Monograph Features New Series and Accompanies Major Exhibition Opening April 17 in Turin New York, April 17, 2025—Aperture presents Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter, an illuminating new publication that brings critical insight into the mind and eye of the renowned American artist. Tracing a spiritual and personal journey through Weems’s career, this book shares her distinctive approach to addressing history, representation, and injustice through the lens of race, gender, and class, while centering Weems as a historical reference point, guide, or muse. Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the "Matter accompanies a related exhibition at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, part of Intesa Sanpaolo’s museum project, on view from April 17 through September 7, 2025. The exhibition is co-organized with Aperture A comprehensive monograph spanning the arc of Weems’s career, The Heart of the Matter features generous presentations of landmark bodies of work, from her early projects, such as Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84), the landmark Kitchen Table Series (1990), and Museums (2006–ongoing); selections from more recent works, such as Scenes and Takes (2016) and Painting the Town (2021); and documentation of major video installations, including The Shape of Things (2021) and Leave Now! (2022). The book also debuts an ambitious and powerful series exploring religion and spirituality for Black Americans across generations, commissioned specifically for the exhibition and catalog. The ambition and vitality of this new series, Preach (2024), represented in the book by more than twenty new images and Weems’s original accompanying texts, celebrates the profound, passionate, and joyful forms of worship that typify Weems’s own experience of the Black Church, while also confronting the violence and oppression inextricably linked to this history. In Meister’s introduction and throughout the book, the artist’s likeness, voice, family history, and spiritual journey offer a distinctive framew